The hot seat

10:08AM, Feb 21, 2012

I like politicians. I can't help it. I like their exotic little
personal cocktails of panicky insecurity and breathtaking
overconfidence. I like their determination and the fact that most
are well-intentioned. I like the fact that they mostly keep doing
their jobs even though they can't be having very much fun, most of
the time.

And I like having dinner with them. This isn't entirely a
function of personal greed, although of course that plays a
substantial part. The truth is that adding food to an interview
changes everything. It renders virtually useless the evasions that
are now traditional to the televised political interview. Try
saying "As I have consistently promised, the Australian government
will walk the reform road with confidence" while tackling a lamb
chop, and you'll see what I mean.

Sharing food is the quickest way to get around the awkwardness
of the journalist-politician relationship, a relationship that -
even at its most civil - is plagued by an episodic asymmetry of
need. Sharing food loosens the lips and gives everyone something to
do with their hands.

You've got to be careful not to overdo it, of course, especially
in the liquor department, where the aim is to induce pleasant
emboldenment in the interviewee, while avoiding irretrievable
soakage of one's own mental faculties.

(Sometimes, it goes horribly awry. I remember one dinner with
several ministers at which a series of excellent confidences were
imparted. The wine was flowing, so I absented myself to the
bathroom regularly, in order to maintain a Biro record of the
highlights on my leg. This seemed foolproof at the time, but less
so the following morning, as anyone who has ever tried to read
shorthand notes off a bedsheet with the aid of a hand mirror will
instantly recognise.)

Anyway, for the last six months, I've been inviting myself round
to politicians' houses for dinner, as part of an extended
laboratory trial of whether any of the above principles hold true
when four cameras and a substantial TV crew are added to the
equation. The results are positive (as they are for the subsidiary
investigation - whether a modern public broadcaster can be
persuaded that going around to people's places, eating food and
rummaging through their expired condiments constitutes legitimate
paid work).

The subjects in the Kitchen Cabinet series - some of
whom you'll recognise immediately, while others are well-kept
national secrets - pony up all sorts of stuff. Thoughts on
politics, of course, but much more besides. One of them confesses
to having once shot a mud crab with a .44 pistol. One bakes her own
dog biscuits - shiny, liver-based treats I declined to sample. One
still has a recipe book she started in Year Nine. One startled me
rather thoroughly by marching into his kitchen with a four-foot
salmon clasped to his breast. Another has written and recorded a
new alternative to the national anthem.

Selfishly, I chose only targets who can actually cook, and
decreed that barbecuing does not count. Harsh, I know, but the
rewards were many; a delicate watercress soup from Penny Wong, for
example. Fragrant yellow curry puffs made by Northern Territory
Country Liberals senator Nigel Scullion with creamy, sweet yabby
tails. Tanya Plibersek's herbed spaghetti, whose heat alone was
enough to cook, perfectly, the cubes of luminous ocean trout she
tossed through it at the last minute. She nicked the recipe from
Environment Minister Tony Burke, another surprisingly handy Cabinet
cook. The brilliant primary colours of a tagliata, assembled
jointly - amid spirited repartee - by Christopher Pyne and Amanda
Vanstone.

Ask someone "How did you learn to cook?" and chances are what
you'll hear in reply will be the story of a life. And nothing goes
better with a political life than a glass of wine, and a plate of
something delicious.

Kitchen Cabinet airs on Wednesdays at 9.30pm on ABC2 and is
repeated on Mondays at 10.30pm.

This article is from the March 2012 issue of Australian
Gourmet Traveller.